


December, 1739

by BannedBloodOranges



Category: Sleepy Hollow (1999), The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - All Media Types
Genre: Backstory, Birth, Character Study, Christmas, Gen, Horses, Mutism, Sadism, Violence, Young Not Yet Headless Horseman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-24 00:09:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20017033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BannedBloodOranges/pseuds/BannedBloodOranges
Summary: He was born a bastard during the December when the husband was away.





	December, 1739

**Author's Note:**

> Old fic found from a while ago.
> 
> There is an old wives tale that children born feet first on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day will be werewolves or changelings.
> 
> I own nothing, non-profit fun only.

_Germany, 1739._

He was born a bastard during the December when the husband was away.

White china trembles to the thunder of the mother's screams; sheets are spoilt by blood and the heave of a woman’s legs in labour. The nurses scatter, bringing bowls of steaming water and fresh towels that soil as soon as they touch the mother’s skin. She is a woman of faded beauty, forty years hence, with six children downstairs; the eldest boy, a stormy eyed child of twelve. During the humid summer, he’d spied his mother in the stables trussing amongst the hay with the muscled back of a man that no one knew the name of.

Six children, and none with birth as vicious as this. The midwife cleans the blood off her hands in an earthen bowl and is keen to beckon a priest. The hours loll, the household in a pained stupor, until midnight, when December 24th draws to its close and finally, the creature is expelled feet first from the mother’s stomach.

Her husband’s children are fair, flaxen, eyes like hazelnuts and soft-faced. The serf’s child, the _bastard_ , sports a shock of black hair beneath the huddle of his shawl and skin that matches the snow outside. He does not cry when he is born, but _roars._

The mother shall claim that her husband left her with a full belly before leaving on his expedition, and what a surprise it would be, to welcome him back with a new baby filling out her arms.

The baby’s eyes are open, fixed on its mother. A cataract blue, sharp and terrifyingly alive.

The mother names her bastard Heinrich. It is an ugly name, a dry spread on the tongue.

It is almost spiteful.

* * *

Their father is a General, a lord of the military, a master at combat and horse riding both. A man of few words, he ignores his daughters and schools his three legitimate sons in the art of war. The eldest boy, now a bold young man of eighteen, is the household’s pride and joy. Blessed with his mother’s beauty and his father’s strength, he boasts of the day he will ride to war. Broad-shouldered, hair like wheat, the chosen child is named Christiaan and he stands out like the sun from his other siblings.

Meanwhile, the blight on the household – little Heinrich, now near seven winters, and yes, they measure his years in his bleak black birthdays – observes the clash and shine of his father’s training from the stables. The horses whine and stamp, agitated by the growing noise, steam jutting from their nostrils. This scrawny boy, clothed in hand me downs, wild hair unkempt, watches with visible hunger. His hands twitch as his father’s powerful forearms bring down the axe onto the dummy fat with hay and flour; it hacks through the shoulder and spills the gut in a delicious rush of white and wheat yellow.

“What are you doing?” Christiaan, with shadow on his beautiful bullish face. He unsheathes his sword and places the tip of it firmly against the tiny stomach. Heinrich had heard him coming. He always does. “Father hates the sight of you.”

Heinrich has a sword. It is crude, made of wood. It is sat beside him on the hay, the “blade” out of sight. In his right hand, he carries a small bag. Christiaan sneers and knocks it away; lumps of carrot roll across the dirt floor. The horses whinny and pant.

Heinrich’s lips curl. The flare of his temper raises, coiling his fingers like claws, before he tempers, shrugs, and gestures sluggishly to Christiaan’s gleaming sword. Christiaan, even when faced with the hated bastard, cannot resist the opportunity to strut. He twirls the handle in his hand, the metal a solid _whip_ through the air. He admires his reflection in the blade.

“Fine, isn’t it?” He sheaths it, a satisfying _clink_ as it hits the hilt. “You’ll never wield something as fine as this, Heinrich. Never. You’ll muck out the horses…”

Whatever humiliating itinerary was about to sprout from that vile mouth is suddenly, violently, halted. Christiaan wheezes through bared teeth, eyeballs bloated with agony.

The play sword, whittled in a moment of quiet mercy by the elderly gardener, is stuck out from Christiaan’s right thigh. The edge of the blade is visible from the back of the puncture and pushes through the skin in a meaty pulse. The blade, no longer blunted, had been sharpened to a perfect, deadly point.

* * *

Father is aware of the sound of a child babbling, and wonders idly if it is his silly faced daughters. But it continues, devolving into a gibberish of sobs and curses.

The old man discovers Heinrich in the stables, experimentally piercing haystacks with the enormous broadsword, so heavy he can only drag it. Christiaan, who has shaken and screamed until his throat was raw, is passed out on the floor in a welling of blood.

Heinrich turns and faces the General, tiny pallid hands firmly fixed on the handle as if welded to it. He stares at the nobleman without fear or apology.

Father, for the first time in seven years, calls him a son.

* * *

Fifteen years and counting, and he wields like a savage and rides like a madman and now its Father’s turn to observe, his pride both hungry and envious. This child, this boy, with alien blood in his veins. Who knew that through a shared appetite for carnage, though the slice of air that breaks after a straight severance, that in this he would find his true heir?

At fifteen, Heinrich is all too ready to be a man. His body is muscled, fife and his speed and strength are second to none, not even his father’s. His mind is empty save for the clash of the sword and the pound of hooves on hard gravel. He trains himself to wield an axe in his right hand and the broadsword on the left and can exchange them at will.

Even with this approval from the Father, Heinrich stands to inherit nothing, and outside the battlefield, is still nothing in the face of his mother and siblings. He is too strange, too feral a creature to ever provoke even a semblance of tenderness from his mother, and his half-siblings hide from him.

The nanny who raised him, who cleared up the sheets torn and tossed by the raving child, who nursed him even as he drew blood from her breast, offers her counsel to the mother. It is not needed, the old woman knows; but she feels, that somewhere, there should be some words for the boy before he departs.

“It is good,” The Italian nanny with her rough German, remembering patting that black mop of hair beneath her fingers, trying in vain to pull the scruff from the roots. The boy bit at everyone else, but from her, he would allow it. Only just. “That his appetites shall be sated in the war.”

And good it is, surely? The wild beast is exactly where he belongs, where he can wreak havoc for the benefit of the crown.

“He shall be feared,” The old nurse continues, as the mother hums, stitching daisies on her needlework. The ancient maid is ignored, and so, she adds, in her native tongue; “And he will be remembered, for better or for worse, when all the rest of you are forgotten and gone.”

* * *

Heinrich is handed over to the military on his sixteenth birthday, and will never again see the grounds that witnessed his bitter growth. It is Christmas Eve as he leaves, trudging up the snow in thick riding boots, the moon a glint off his spurs. No longer is he a boy, but he was never truly a child in the first place.

His horse, a black steed, awaits beneath the cover of the trees. Surrounding his mount are the soldiers that have come to escort him. Looks are silently exchanged as the figure appears, and they press back at his approach. But Heinrich is not looking at them but reaches for the hair of the horse, something akin to fondness in his face.

“You take care,” The Italian nanny is there, wrapped up in shawls that cower shadows on her rugged face. She has attached a bundle to the house’s back, full of the food he will eat on the way, dried sausage and meat and bread. “You fight well, my little daredevil.”

Heinrich’s large hands smooth down the horse’s mantle. He grunts in response, before mounting his horse. _There is grace there,_ the old woman thinks. _A grace of something awful, like a bobcat or a wolf that wanders alone._

Heinrich roars, gleeful, tugging at the reins; the horse spurs into a gallop, frost kicked up under its hooves. And away he goes, as the other men, startled, keen hastily behind.

It is December 1755.


End file.
